Hannah McCann

Went to the launch of the new media production studio at UniMelb today — this picture doesn’t do justice to how amazing it looks, the tech! Seriously good news for students wanting to develop media production skills

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August is arguably the best time of year not only because is it poetry month 💘 but also it is when the Melbourne International Film Festival runs! Get onto it, stat!

miff.com.au

The supreme gaslighting involved to argue that an ad playing on genes/jeans and promoting blonde hair and blue eyes is not overtly eugenicist

The killing code: strange symbols in a WA settler’s diaries lay bare frontier atrocities Exclusive: Stories of murders passed down by Yamatji elders are confirmed by a cipher hidden in the 1850s journals of prominent pastoralist Major Logue. Now descendants on both sides want to break the...

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Some really brilliant work here … strong recommend

The Subway by Chappell Roan on Apple Music

New Chappell Roan giving gay child of The Sundays x Japanese Breakfast

“I'm still counting down all of the days/
'Til you're just another girl on the subway”

music.apple.com/au/album/the...

The things you stumble across on UniMelb campus… (unsurprisingly I did not buy the Plath)

ANU feminists slam cuts for 'destroying' gender studies program ANU leadership likened to Donald Trump's chainsaw cutting of public service.

Devastated to hear about cuts to gender studies at the ANU. I was the inaugural ANU Gender Institute PhD Scholar and it was in gender studies that I realised my love of teaching. The ANU receives special federal funding, there is no need for these cuts!

www.canberratimes.com.au/story/902190...

'Mum, I don't want your life.' Why young girls are saying no to everything we wanted. “Feminist exhaustion isn’t feminism’s fault.”

Some comments from me in this piece, the most important being that I think anti-trans “feminists” have sucked the air out of the feminist movement

www.mamamia.com.au/feminist-exh...

Mary Noonan — Bad Lilies A poem by Mary Noonan

Love Bad Lilies. This one from Mary Noonan

www.badlilies.uk/mary-noonan

I’m a bisexual, genderqueer comic who found religion – this is what it taught me Comedian Sam Williams reflects on finding Christianity as a bi, genderqueer comedian, and how he turned his experience into a new Fringe show

"It was at Brighton university where things started to fall into their fruity place. I hung around with the drag society, and being bisexual started to feel not just normal but actually quite dull"

www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/28/s...

Open letter against the adoption of the Australian Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism's Plan - Overland literary journal We, the undersigned university researchers, educators, students and professional staff, call on the Australian Government to reject the unprecedented attack on academic freedom and the autonomy of uni...

University friends, please read, sign and share this open letter: overland.org.au/2025/07/open...

Israel trying to pull a “fake news” on their starvation of an entire population is really something

As scholars of genocide, we demand an end to Israel’s atrocities | Open letter Within weeks, 400 colleagues joined our organization. We say: it is not too late to save lives. End the genocide now

“Since the 7 October massacre, Israeli officials and their accomplices have justified genocidal violence against Palestinians by equating Hamas with Nazism, instrumentalizing the memory of the Holocaust to advance, rather than prevent, mass violence”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

FOR JOHN CLARE Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer': mind off his caroling— so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future-the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope— letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay. It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because

there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too-nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to-dumb bird. But the others-and they in some way must know too-it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Happy birthday to John Ashbery, whose poetry opened a tiny weird window in me that I’ve never wanted to close again. This is “For John Clare,” my favorite of all of his poems.

Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups Reports detailing intentional targeting of Palestinians as a group, and systemic destruction of Palestinian society, add to pressure for action

“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it”

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Check out my piece on teaching sociological theory in cultural studies, up on @firstpublics.bsky.social
👇🏼👇🏼

thesocietypages.org/firstpublics...

Protesting over Gaza’s starvation feels like screaming into a void – but we mustn’t stop | Nesrine Malik Political platitudes and a few trucks of aid won’t save the children dying now. But they show leaders can’t ignore public opinion for ever, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Fact: Israel blocking aid = Israel killing babies

“Every single one of these deaths, and those that will come, is preventable. The World Health Organization described the starvation as ‘man-made’, but it is more than that. It is foreseeable and thus deliberate”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Pleased to be on this long list with so many stellar poets 💘 (full list at www.instagram.com/wapoets)

Haha okay, a real “Onion describing facts” moment

Barrie noooo where?

People should sign this 👇🏼👇🏼

"The social breakdown that we are witnessing, the degrading of human beings, is not a byproduct of the harm that Israel is inflicting. That’s the central element of the crime: destroying Palestinian society. The government of Israel shows no indication that it cares in the slightest whether Palestinians live or die. It wants to avoid the stigma of being accused of starvation and genocide, and the GHF is its current alibi. Let’s not be fooled." Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He has been a humanitarian worker and written on famine and related issues for 40 years

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Selfie PSA to say the new Superman film rules. (Relatedly, if anyone want to do a PhD with me on a queer theory of pet ownership in contemporary life, please contact me)

Poetry readings from Dan Hogan, Peter Bakowski and Helen Jarvis late tonight was so good that I forgot to take any pictures, but here’s one from Jarvis’ marvellous collection

“because things cannot always stay the same”

Four panel cartoon. Panel 1: White woman smiles sadly at her happy child while they both eat from bowls full of food at home. Above the woman's head is a thought bubble with starving Palestinian children holding out empty bowls Panel 2: White woman walking to the park on a sunny day. Her happy child skips along ahead of her. Above the woman's head is a thought bubble showing an exhausted, thin Palestinian mother walking along carrying her belongings looking up at bombs falling from the sky. Her exhausted son walks ahead, also carrying belongings Panel 3: White woman puts a bandaid on her crying son's knee Above the woman's head is a thought bubble with a starving Palestinian boy who has had his leg blown off being raced to hospital on a stretcher Panel 4: White woman hugs her happy son in a tight embrace. Above the woman's head is a thought bubble with terrified starving Palestinian mother tightly clutching her terrified son as bombs drop in the distance

In the @australia.theguardian.com six weeks ago

‘South Park’s most furious episode ever’: the jaw-dropping Satanic takedown of Donald Trump They’ve depicted the president’s privates. They’ve shown him in flagrante with the devil. The makers of the foul-mouthed US cartoon have certainly thrown down the gauntlet …

“If Trump could get $16m by suing Paramount over an editorially acceptable edit on a news programme, then it stands to reason that he will try to go after a cartoon that depicts him trying to insert his microscopic penis into Satan”

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Screenshot of the event page for the film

Screening of No Other Land tonight at UniMelb for staff and students. Register here: events.humanitix.com/no-other-lan...

Felicity Plunkett just announced as the new ABR Poetry Editor 🤍

*Checks to see how centrism is working out in the UK* oh

Israel blocking aid from Gaza is creating ‘chaos and death’, say humanitarian groups Letter signed by agencies including Doctors Without Borders condemns Israeli military attacks on Palestinians

To all who support Israel’s unfathomable violence, what is the end game here? Your actions and inactions and turning away is murderous, but you will *never* kill Palestine

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...